Now and Then: 1221 Broadway

Now a ‘best place to live,’ South Broadway’s revitalization is epitomized in the story of 1221 Broadway

By Chris Warren

Photo Courtesy 1221 Broadway

If you’d asked Mickey Conrad if the abandoned downtown development he first walked around 10 years ago would someday receive a prestigious national architecture award, he likely would have laughed in your face. And he would have been right to have that reaction. “It reminded me of a partially built Eastern European communist housing project,” says Conrad, a founding partner of OCO Architects, about the hulking concrete superstructure he encountered near what is now the Pearl Brewery complex. “It was a grim and dismal place.”

While the building had been started and then abandoned due to legal problems and bankruptcy, it did technically serve as a dwelling. “It was inhabited by over 70 homeless people and some said it was the largest homeless housing complex run by the homeless,” he recalls. “We surveyed the project and came across these nests built up of old rags and newspapers and trash. You could see where people were laying all over the place. And they had stolen all of the plumbing and wiring and handrails to take to the salvage yard.”

Fast forward a decade and this once apocalypse-friendly housing complex has been transformed into 1221 Broadway, one of the most trendy and sought-after places to live in an ever more bustling and seemingly always improving downtown. Not only that, but the project—which is featured in our July issue, as part of a package of stories on desirable neighborhoods to live in—was recently recognized with a national award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). One of 10 recipients of an AIA Housing Award, 1221 Broadway got the nod over a slew of other national entries in the multifamily housing category, which highlights outstanding condominium and apartment design. In particular, the AIA noted 1221 Broadway’s energy efficient design as well as its role in revitalizing the surrounding neighborhood.

With the benefit of hindsight, Conrad now says that some of the biggest challenges he and his team faced actually forced them to do their best work. Most prominently, since his task was to adapt an existing structure, he had no choice but to work with and around the poured concrete that the previous developers had put in place. “It’s usually all sticks and bricks,” he says. “That created design challenges because these things were immovable.”

Fortunately, Conrad already had experience in metamorphosis, having already taken an existing fabricating plant and repurposed its rusty metal and industrial trappings into OCO’s headquarters. In the case of 1221 Broadway, the materials were different but the goal was similar. “We wanted to do something like we did with our office and make it a cool urban gritty kind of place. That was the vision,” he says. Importantly, he also wanted to take advantage of San Antonio’s great climate. “The floor plans were compartmentalized and cramped and small and the idea was to open them up and bring in natural light from the street and courtyard side and fill it with natural light. It was a way to celebrate a big thing it had going for it.”

The experience of working with some serious limitations is one that Conrad enjoyed—at least that’s what he says now. “We cussed at it a lot. It created a challenge to get plumbing in and get things to work around the concrete structure,” he says. “But at the end of the day, I don’t think it would have turned out as nice if it had been a clean sheet of paper. Those constraints forced us to be creative in different ways.”